


not scared of the elements

by cinderlily



Category: Pitch (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-26
Updated: 2017-05-26
Packaged: 2018-11-05 05:50:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11007288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinderlily/pseuds/cinderlily
Summary: Mike Lawson was interviewed for a puff piece, his Desert Island must haves. One of which was Ginny Baker. What does that even mean?





	not scared of the elements

Mike walked into the clubhouse barely awake. He hated morning games. He showed up early enough, what the hell did they have to have a game starting at noon for? It was just cruel and unusual punishment. He turned the corner to his locker and saw… A picture of himself. 

“You know, you left me crushed, Lawson,” Andersen called out from a few seats down. 

It took him a minute to get to the actual words ON the picture of himself but when he did he cringed. He told his agent he wasn’t good with press stuff, but he’d been assured that it was a complete piece of fluff. That, apparently, didn’t mean much. 

“ **Lawson’s Desert Island Necessities** ” 

“I’ve played with you for nine seasons,” Andersen’s voice came from closer up. “Nine seasons, and yet you go for _Ginny_ for the player you’d be stuck on an island with. GINNY.” 

His urge to make a comment about Andersen and his particularly foul feet passed quickly. “I figured I’d want someone without an AARP card to help me get off the island.” 

“ _Get off_ indeed.” Came from somewhere in the room and it went dead ass silent. 

Mike turned to the room at large and put his hands on his hips. “That is the _last_ time that joke will be made in this locker room.” 

Blip leaned over and nudged him. “Better turn off the TV.” 

“What the…” he started but then he saw Eric Byrnes’ face and two notes down from what he was talking about was a simple phrase. 

‘Lawson + Baker’ 

“That’s just bad reporting. They might as well have put a heart around our names,” he shoved a hand up at the screen. 

From the doors, he heard a familiar voice. “Whose names?” 

He didn’t quite think he was young enough to blush anymore but damned if he didn’t feel the pink high in his cheeks. He turned around and grabbing the paper taped to his locker but she shoved the entire magazine at his chest. 

“Really Mike?” 

Mike opened his mouth to say that he was thinking of a young resourceful player and she was young and resourceful but she cocked her head and frowned at him. 

“Stuck on a freaking deserted island and you chose to bring COCONUT water? We’re on an island. There will be coconuts. Bring regular water, hell, bring freaking Vodka. Especially if you’re bringing me. It’ll double as an astringent for cuts and give some flavor to food if we cook with it. Geez.” 

He sagged a little in relief and then pointed at her. “See guys, this is why you bring Ginny Baker. Do any of you even know what an astringent is?” 

“Oh and don’t even get me started on your music choices, we’re going to have to have a serious talk about your five songs…” 

“Hey, hey, hey,” he said, turning towards her. “I was just defending you.” 

She shrugged. “If you’re dragging me to some desert island and leaving me with three songs from before I was born, one of which is country, I am allowed to tell you my feelings about it.” 

“Just settle back and let her win, man,” Blip said. “I’ve been dealing with it forever.” 

Mike made a face. “It was supposed to be a fluff piece!” 

She made a face back. “Eh. I have to go finish up getting ready. We’ll talk later.” 

*

He’d wished, hoped, hell he’d _prayed_ that that was the end of the conversation. It really had been just a fluffy piece of bull crap. He filled the paperwork out, which then got translated onto the paper so people could see his crappy writing. He took a picture posing with a bat and his arms flexed. It’d barely taken an afternoon. 

But it wasn’t over. The guys seemed to find the fact that he chose Ginny over them as a personal affront, as most of them had known each other for a lot longer than Ginny had and a few were insistent on them being the stronger better choice. But it was Ginny that really got into it. 

She nitpicked everything as apparently, she didn’t get this was theoretical and he had to answer for all his answers.

“ _Moneyball_? You have all the books in the world and in your top three is MONEYBALL. But not a survival guide?” 

“I get the protein bars, good choice, but what the hell is with the fries. We’re going to be baking in the sun, we don’t need to _lose_ electrolytes.” 

“An inflatable mattress, obvious choice, okay? Cause we build a lean-to, we can thatch a blanket together and maybe even make a pillow or two. It’s the easiest. Your bat was a dumb choice. You didn’t even put a BALL, Lawson.” 

He was going to punch her nondominant arm as hard as he could get away with the next time she came to him with a quibble. He swore it. But then, just as suddenly as it started, it stopped. She went from being all about the magazine to avoid talking about it like the plague. 

Which. Was not like Ginny at all. In fact, it was more the opposite of Ginny. She was not unlike his ex-wife. (Not that he would ever utter those words aloud EVER.) She didn’t let things go, especially when she knew it got under his skin. 

He started with the obvious, walking up to Blip with his body turned towards Blips locker so that no one could hear. “Have you noticed anything with Ginny the last day or so?” 

Blip looked up from his phone, grimaced and said. “No.” 

But it was most definitely not the ‘no’ of a man who hadn’t noticed something different going on with Ginny. It was the no of a man who was not going to say a word about it. 

“Come on Blip, help me out here,” Mike said. “She’s gone all Stepford on me.” 

Blip’s eyes went wide and he grabbed for his Beats. “Oh hell no. You talk to Ginny, or you live your life in a happy blissful bubble. I’m choosing the bubble.” 

He watched Blip slip on his headphones and it was like he was completely gone from the room. He grimaced. He hated being halfway sure that he’d done something and all the way sure he had no idea what it was. It was the bane of his existence and he’d spent most of his life that way. 

Ginny’s locker room door was a touch open, meaning she wouldn’t mind someone knocking on it, at least usually that’s what it mean. She’d made rules the season before, but he wasn’t sure if the rules exactly applied to him at the moment. Either way, he rapped on the door with a knuckle until he heard her call that it was okay to enter. 

When he opened the door she was seated with her knees up on the wall, headphones on one ear. She almost looked like she might fall when she saw him. He braced to move to catch her but she fell forward instead. 

“Lawson,” she said, a smile spreading on her face but not making it quite further than her lips. “What’s up? Want to go over the tape? You know it’s Burger’s start, right?” 

He shrugged. Yeah, he knew that. He was the catcher after all. But they’d gone over tape the night before, Burger was worse at getting up than he was. He bit his lip and thought for a second but decided blunt usually worked in the past so he might as well just go for it. 

“So, did I fuck up something or is this a you thing? Because I’ve been going over the last two days and I have probably fucked up somewhere but you know, I’ve been told I can be a dense person so I’d prefer to just hear it. I don’t like fake you.” 

Ginny flinched. “Fake me?” 

“Yeah, you aren’t smiling, you are showing your teeth,” he said, making a grimace to show her what he meant. “Freaking me out.” 

She put her hands on her knees and pushed herself up. “It wasn’t you, you didn’t fuck up. You are totally in the clear. We good?” 

She had begun to push him out her door and he was just about tired enough to let her but then his brain re-engaged. “What do you mean that _I_ didn’t fuck up? Cause that leaves you, and I don’t think you fucked up. So why be awkward if no one fucked up.”

“Can we not?” she asked the whine a reminder of when he teased her about her ‘fast’ ball. 

“No, we can not not,” he said, then thought about the sentence. “We can’t not? You know what I’m saying, Baker.” 

She sighed and backed up a few inches, crossing her arms and looking at a spot that was just to the right of where his eye line actually was. “I didn’t _fuck up_ exactly, but I did let some things go too far. I should have seen that and I am now trying to just not.” 

He blinked at her. “Was that supposed to make sense?” 

“I shouldn’t have prodded so much about the Desert Island,” she said. “It was stupid.” 

“Hell yeah it was stupid,” he said and she snapped her eyes to look at him. “I meant me doing it. I was just doing what the people who I pay to tell me what to do told me to. It was stupid and I did it. You will probably do a hundred of them. What’s the big deal?” 

A surprisingly large number of emotions seemed to pass over her face in a short amount of time, the last, he thought, seemed to be relief. She smiled, small, but this time it was a lot more realistic than it was at the beginning of the conversation. She sat back down on the chair again and in a moment started shooing him out. 

“One of us is playing in little more than an hour,” she said flippantly. “Go be useful, Lawson.” 

He still felt like there was more to be said, but at very least he’d said something and she’d smiled without looking like it hurt. He considered the conversation at least a partial success, even if it left something at the back of his head unsatisfied. 

“Could you close the door on your way out?” 

He did. 

* 

The one true bonus of playing a day game (ones _not_ at 12:10 but at 1:15 like normal humans) was that they were done before four. They had even won, kicking the Dodgers back to Lala Land with a swift 4-0 foot to the ass. It was satisfying and it was worth celebrating, except it was three in the afternoon and even the worst of the drinkers weren’t up for a round at a bar. 

Which meant the group parted ways and he found himself in the parking lot about to get in his car when he overheard the familiar cadence of Ginny’s voice. She was always up for something at least mildly fun and maybe it would get the look off her face. He moved to get out of his car when he heard who she was talking to. 

“Ginny, you aren’t being fair to yourself here,” Blip said. “I mean, he asked you point blank what was wrong and you just said you were sorry for annoying him?” 

“Shut up,” Ginny said, and even without seeing her he could picture with great clarity the teeth baring she was giving Blip. So much for keeping to the blissful bubble. 

He missed some of it, a car passed by and he realized in a moment he probably seemed sketchy and weird but it didn’t stop him from straining to hear him. “… Desert Island. You know it’s about more than that with you two. It’s been about more than that for a while.” 

“Just because you are **a** dad, doesn’t make you mine, Sanders. Let it go.” 

“Okay, okay,” Blip said, and his voice was coming louder. “Think about it, Gin.” 

Something in Mike went panicky but not in the logical sense. He stood up straight. Blip’s car was right beside him. Fuckity fuck. Thankfully it was a huge as hell SUV that was probably ten times too big for his family of four but had blessedly shielded him from the two of them. 

Blip came around the corner and paused mid-step when he saw Mike staring straight forward at him. He was generally a little more smooth when it came to things but this time he looked Blip dead center in the face and then ducked into his car. Closing the door and locking it, turning on the loud music that he forgot he’d been listening to that morning but masked the outdoor sounds quite nicely. 

He took a full thirty seconds to breathe, long enough to watch as Ginny’s car passed behind him, followed by Blip’s monster. His heart was still going fast, but at least he wasn’t driving blind or stupid and he made it out of the arena by bypassing the line of people who wanted signatures. He felt kind of like a dick doing so, but he’d sign them all the next time, he promised himself. 

* 

By six that evening, he’d gone over the short conversation he’d heard probably three hundred times. He turned it on its head, tried to reimagine what some of the words meant. He even thought about calling Rachel about it but decided that was a path left to its own devices. 

The part he kept coming back to was, “ _more than that between you two_.” 

He wasn’t dumb enough to think it was anything else on earth than about the two of them. Nor was he dumb enough not to at least partially get it. He hadn’t been stupid when the magazine came out. There was an infinite list of people who he could have put on who he would have been stuck on an island with. People who were stronger had more in the ways of survival. 

But he picked Ginny. He hadn’t thought about it at the time, really. The question was there, “Teammate you’d be stuck with” and he wrote her name with about as much thought as it took to write it. He liked conversations with her. He liked her company. Sure, he could be stuck on an island with her. It would be easy. 

It hadn’t truly hit him how telling that was until he’d seen the look on Blip’s face the first day. The half curious half furious frown, the way he cocked his eyebrow at the lewd comments from teammates. It was… almost a Rorschach test, he guessed. 

The question was shown to him and he was what he wanted in it. And he wanted Ginny. 

He _wanted_ Ginny. 

Not a novel idea. Not one that he’d never considered. Hell, he’d considered it from many many angles. But in the nearly two seasons they’d played against each other they had only had one close call and he stood by the mitigating circumstances of that one. They’d gotten around it, moved on and moved forward.

She’d dated Noah for a year, he’d tried things with Rachel so many times he lost count. In the end, neither of their relationships worked, but not because of the other, just because that was how things went. Relationships worked, relationships didn’t. 

He hadn’t _actively_ thought about Ginny and him for a while because… well. He hadn’t. He’d let life pass by him with the waves of some one night stands, less than before but still a few. He even had a thing he could call a relationship that lasted a whole month before she became annoyed by the fact that he talked to Ginny on the phone. 

Two hours of obsessing was leaving him no further along to anywhere then he’d started. He picked his phone up, no calls or texts but a few updates on team scores from around the nation, the ESPN app keeping him acutely aware of their position in the standings. 

Was this the type of thing he could text about? Call about? He doubted it. He guessed in the scope of their relationship a call wouldn’t be out of bounds. They had spent many nights talking to each other about pretty much everything on the phone. Hell, they’d done it while they were in the same hotel on different floors.

But he was too afraid he’d chicken out. That he would just make dumb small talk like he knew he could, hang up and spend the rest of the night staring at the wall and thinking about the same conversation from earlier with the mix of maybe a few talking points of the phone call. 

Instead, he slipped on a pair of jeans and a ratty pair of Chucks he kept by the back door and walked out to his car before he could let himself think. She was still young, so when she’d bought her townhouse it was more central than the older players had. She lived where she could walk to a small market and see the beach from her balcony. 

The drive was painfully slow, going the wrong way upstream in the shit stream that was the highways of San Diego. He practiced things he would say, but it was useless. He wasn’t one for grand speeches, he had to force himself to do it for the team and even then he sounded mostly like a jackass. He knew it. She’d told him as much.

He drove up to the little check-in booth of her building and realized with great embarrassment he had to _check in_ with her to get in. He forced bravado with the guard and made small talk as the guy called Ginny’s number. He hoped she was at very least home because… well. That would be embarrassing. The letting him in part would also be nice, but he was taking baby steps. 

The guard looked at him in silence for a second but pressed the button to open the gate, giving a wave and a simple. “Work on your first base skills if you’re going to transition.” 

A part of Mike wanted to stay behind and explain just how much that sucked and how little that guy had the right to say that to him but he was too tired and anxious to get into it. He did save the name on his shirt for his memory bank because ‘Jerry’ was going to get a nice little speech sometime. 

He pulled into a guest spot that he more or less had claimed as his own over the year or so she’d lived there. She’d have parties and movie nights, he’d picked her up for games when she was still recovering. It was just… his spot. 

Maybe, possibly he was becoming more aware of how much of an idiot he’d been in the last few months. Years. Whatever. 

He felt like his stomach was rising faster than the elevator was going, as by the time he reached the third floor it was somewhere in his throat and his heart was not far behind it. He exhaled and inhaled and swallowed around the lump a few times before he straightened his shirt and walked forward. 

Her door, the third one in on the left, was slightly open. That was kind of a tradition with them. She always said she’d get him a key but then never did. He wondered if she was hoping they’d just give up and go back to routine. 

This was doubly so when he walked in to find an open beer and her sitting on her couch, back towards him with ESPN on. 

“You know, you could have called,” she said. “I could have been doing something.” 

He picked up the beer and took a long pull. “You doing something? Like what? Washing your hair?” 

She turned her head and chucked a pillow at him and really, it would be so easy. Just forget the magazine. But she smiled, and he knew that was not going to happen. He caught the pillow because… well. He could. That was quite literally his job title. 

He slipped his shoes off and put them alongside her trainers by the door, walked over to the couch and slid into his spot. ESPN was talking, not shockingly, about the Subway series. 

“Two New York teams,” Ginny mused, bottle at her lips. “I wonder if they get hard-ons for this stuff.” 

“I think I might love you,” he blurted and blessedly he saw that she hadn’t quite taken a sip yet because she seemed to choke on air. 

She was already on the edge of the couch, the arm right next to her, but she crept up onto it and turned towards him. “Um. What?”

“That wasn’t how I was going to say it,” he said, mostly to himself. Ginny was looking at him like he’d told her he had a disease that was transmitted by proximity. 

“How were you going to do it? Like. Lead up to it? Cause that is something you lead up to, Lawson. You talk in through. You think it through. Have you thought it through? You don’t just _say_ that.” 

He blinked at her. There were possibly a hundred reasons he could easily pick from to really tell her why he loved her. The stupid little things like her smile or how she licked her lips when she was excited to talk about something or the big things like the way she talked about things that made her happy and the way she treated every single person as equals even so early in the game. There was a pool he could pick from but it all came down to the basic. 

“See, I didn’t think when I was filling out that stupid Deserted Island list,” he said and she rolled her eyes and was about to say something. “But that’s the whole thing. You had good reasons about almost everything on the list. Except for my music, of course… but I didn’t think of it. I just wrote down what came naturally. 

“And that was you, Baker. I didn’t want to be stuck on some _imagined_ island with anyone other than you. Thompson is basically Bear Grylls with a glove and I still chose you. Because I’d miss your face. And your smile. And your stupid whining about my music or my choice of items to bring along. So. I’m pretty sure that means I love you, Ginny. Or I’m crazy. Quite possibly both.” 

Ginny slipped a hand through her loose hair and took a minute to finish the beer in her hand. She looked at Mike and then at her hands, and then at him. She was processing. He got it, but his heart was beating pretty damn hard and if she was going to kick him out it would be nice before the tachycardia killed him. 

She held up a finger and stood up. “Could you just?” 

He watched her walk to the kitchen, put her bottle down and walk down the hallway out of sight. He thought, maybe, of leaving, but then she came back, hair back in a ponytail and lips a little pinker. She sat down next to him and then, in one swift move, straddled him to kiss him. 

His hands went up to her back automatically, grabbing at her back and bringing her as close to him as he could manage. He knew instantly the pink of her lips was lipgloss, sticky and sweet but it really didn’t mask the beer beneath it. Which was, to him, kind of perfect for her. She pulled back and looked at him with just a hint of hesitation. 

“You okay?” she asked. 

He exhaled loudly and pushed up to give her another kiss. “Yeah, I’m okay. You?” 

“I got wrapped up in it,” she said, leaning her forehead against it. “You put my name down on that stupid list and I got caught up in it. I thought… actually. No. I didn’t think. I just hoped. I hoped you were thinking the same as me. But you know. Then I realized I was being … We’ve been good about _not_ talking about it.” 

He tilted his head. “Maybe we can stop that now.” 

“Maybe,” she smiled again and if he could just get her to smile like that every day he was pretty sure he was totally okay with anything else in his life. She leaned in to kiss him again, which was also a goal for daily. 

*

The sand between his toes felt so good, the air feeling good on his skin. It had been a long season, one that ended too soon but the fresh air and the smell of flowers in the air was pretty much the best remedy he could think of. 

“You know, we do get this as a private beach for the next few days,” came from behind him. He looked back at Ginny, walking towards him with a couple of beers. He marveled at the way her hips moved in the swimsuit he swore he was going to buy the company that made it just to keep it for her only. 

He took his beer. “Is that so?” 

“You could almost say it’s deserted,” she said as she sat down next to him. 

“And you’re stuck with me.”

She leaned in for a soft kiss. “Only person I would be with.” 

“Me too.” 

“Love you, Lawson.” 

“Should I put on some music?” he grinned. 

She nudged him hard enough he fell sideways onto the sand. He spilled half his beer but when she pinned him on the ground it was totally worth it.

_I am not scared of the elements_   
_I am under-prepared, but I am willing_  
 _And even better_   
_I get to be the other half of you_   
-Sara Bareilles

**Author's Note:**

> I am seriously not taking the cancellation well. SO. Here. Have me having fluff for my emotion's sake. Stupid Fox.


End file.
